New formula shows who’s really top of the tweeters (via @dubber)

The most influential Twitter feeds don’t necessarily have the most followers. That’s the insight given by a new technique for ranking twitterers, which has been used to create a chart of the top 100 news-media Twitter feeds.

The new system is different from conventional web page rankings, which rely on the PageRank algorithm developed by Larry Page at Google. This judges that a page is important if other important pages link to it, so a website’s rank mostly comes from analysis of the pattern of links to and from other websites.

The new method of ranking throws up some surprises. For example, the team found that the most popular twitterers are not necessarily the most influential. Popular feeds may reach many followers, but if tweets are rarely passed on they do not spread. The most influential Twitter feeds, on the other hand, are the ones with followers who retweet the messages and persuade passive followers to become active.